he scientific study of the process of social influencehas been under way for well over half a century,beginning in earnest with the propaganda, publicinformation and persuasion programs of WorldWar II. Since that time, numerous social scientists have inves-tigated the ways in which one individual can influence anoth-er’s attitudes and actions. For the past 30 years, I have partic-ipated in that endeavor, concentrating primarily on the majorfactors that bring about a specific form of behavior change

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compliance with a request. Six basic tendencies of human be-havior come into play in generating a positive response: re-ciprocation, consistency, social validation, liking, authorityand scarcity. As these six tendencies help to govern our busi-ness dealings, our societal involvements and our personal re-lationships, knowledge of the rules of persuasion can truly bethought of as empowerment.

Reciprocation

hen the Disabled American Veterans organizationmails out requests for contributions, the appeal suc-ceeds only about 18 percent of the time. But when the mailingincludes a set of free personalized address labels, the successrate almost doubles, to 35 percent. To understand the effect of the unsolicited gift, we must recognize the reach and power of an essential rule of human conduct: the code of reciprocity.All societies subscribe to a norm that obligates individu-als to repay in kind what they have received. Evolutionary se-lection pressure has probably entrenched the behavior in so-cial animals such as ourselves. The demands of reciprocitybegin to explain the boost in donations to the veterans group.Receiving a gift

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unsolicited and perhaps even unwanted

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Scientiﬁc American

February2001

The Science of Persuasion

TheScienceof

Salespeople,politicians,friends and family all have a stake ingetting you to agree to their requests.Social psychology hasdetermined the basic principles that govern getting to “yes”

by Robert B. Cialdini

Hello there.I hope you’ve enjoyed the magazine so far.Now I’d like to let you in on something of great importance to you personally. Haveyou ever been tricked into saying yes? Everfelt trapped into buying something you did-n’t really want or contributing to some sus- picious-sounding cause? And have you everwished you understood why you acted inthis way so that you could withstand theseclever ploys in the future?Yes? Then clearly this article is just right foryou. It contains valuable information on themost powerful psychological pressures that get you to say yes to requests. And it’schock-full of

new,improved

research show-ing exactly how and why these techniqueswork. So don’t delay, just settle in and get the information that, after all, you’ve al-ready agreed you want.

convinced signiﬁcant numbers of potential donors to returnthe favor.Charitable organizations are far from alone in taking thisapproach: food stores offer free samples, exterminators offerfree in-home inspections, health clubs offer free workouts.Customers are thus exposed to the product or service, butthey are also indebted. Consumers are not the only ones whofall under the sway of reciprocity. Pharmaceutical companiesspend millions of dollars every year to support medical re-searchers and to provide gifts to individual physicians

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activ-ities that may subtly inﬂuence researchers’ ﬁndings and phy-sicians’ recommendations. A 1998 study in the

New England Journal of Medicine

found that only 37 percent of research-ers who published conclusions critical of the safety of calci-um channel blockers had received prior drug company sup-port. Among researchers whose conclusions supported thedrugs’ safety, however, the number of those who had receivedfree trips, research funding or employment skyrocketed

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to100 percent.Reciprocity includes more than gifts and favors; it alsoapplies to concessions that people make to one another. Forexample, assume that you reject my large request, and I thenmake a concession to you by retreating to a smaller request.You may very well then reciprocate with a concession of yourown: agreement with my lesser request. In the mid-1970s mycolleagues and I conducted an experiment that clearly illus-trates the dynamics of reciprocal concessions. We stopped arandom sample of passersby on public walkways and askedif they would volunteer to chaperone juvenile detention cen-ter inmates on a day trip to the zoo. As expected, very fewcomplied, only 17 percent.For another random sample of passersby, however, webegan with an even larger request: to serve as an unpaidcounselor at the center for two hours per week for the nexttwo years. Everyone in this second sampling rejected the ex-treme appeal. At that point we offered them a concession. “If you can’t do that,” we asked, “would you chaperone a groupof juvenile detention center inmates on a day trip to thezoo?” Our concession powerfully stimulated return conces-sions. The compliance rate nearly tripled, to 50 percent, com-pared with the straightforward zoo-trip request.

Consistency

n 1998 Gordon Sinclair, the owner of a well-known Chica-go restaurant, was struggling with a problem that afﬂictsall restaurateurs. Patrons frequently reserve a table but, with-out notice, fail to appear. Sinclair solved the problem by ask-ing his receptionist to change two words of what she said tocallers requesting reservations. The change dropped his no-call, no-show rate from 30 to 10 percent immediately.The two words were effective because they commissionedthe force of another potent human motivation: the desire tobe, and to appear, consistent. The receptionist merely modi-ﬁed her request from “Please call if you have to change yourplans” to “Will you please call if you have to change yourplans?” At that point, she politely paused and waited for a

www.sciam.com

Scientiﬁc American

February2001 77

S T E V E N A D A M S

A P P h o t o

FREE SAMPLES carry a subtle price tag; they psychologically in-debt the consumer to reciprocate. Here shoppers get complimen-tarytastes of a new product, green ketchup. The samples primethe consumer to return the favor with a purchase. The novel col-or may also make the product seem scarce, an attractive attribute.

response. The wait was pivotal becauseit induced customers to ﬁll the pausewith a public commitment. And publiccommitments, even seemingly minorones, direct future action.In another example, Joseph Schwarz-wald of Bar-Ilan University in Israel andhis co-workers nearly doubled mone-tary contributions for the handicappedin certain neighborhoods. The key fac-tor: two weeks before asking for contri-butions, they got residents to sign a pe-tition supporting the handicapped, thusmaking a public commitment to thatsame cause.

Social Validation

n a wintry morning in the late1960s, a man stopped on a busyNew York City sidewalk and gazedskyward for 60 seconds, at nothing inparticular. He did so as part of an ex-periment by City University of NewYork social psychologists Stanley Mil-gram, Leonard Bickman and LawrenceBerkowitz that was designed to find outwhat effect this action would have onpassersby. Most simply detoured orbrushed by; 4 percent joined the man inlooking up. The experiment was thenrepeated with a slight change. With themodification, large numbers of pedes-trians were induced to come to a halt,crowd together and peer upward.The single alteration in the experi-ment incorporated the phenomenon of social validation. One fundamentalway that we decide what to do in a sit-uation is to look to what others are do-ing or have done there. If many individ-uals have decided in favor of aparticular idea, we are more likelyto follow, because we perceive theidea to be more correct, morevalid.Milgram, Bickman and Berkowitzintroduced the influence of socialvalidation into their street experi-ment simply by having five menrather than one look up at nothing.With the larger initial set of upwardgazers, the percentage of New Yorkerswho followed suit more than quadru-pled, to 18 percent. Bigger initial sets of planted up-lookers generated an evengreater response: a starter group of 15led 40 percent of passersby to join in,nearly stopping traffic within oneminute.Taking advantage of social valida-tion, requesters can stimulate our com-pliance by demonstrating (or merelyimplying) that others just like us havealready complied. For example, a studyfound that a fund-raiser who showedhomeowners a list of neighbors who haddonated to a local charity significantlyincreased the frequency of contributions;the longer the list, the greater the effect.Marketers, therefore, go out of theirway to inform us when their product isthe largest-selling or fastest-growing of its kind, and televisioncommercials reg-ularly depict crowds rushing to storesto acquire the advertised item.Less obvious, however, are the cir-cumstances under which social valida-tion can backfire to produce the oppositeof what a requester intends. An exam-ple is the understandable but poten-tially misguided tendency of health edu-cators to call attention to a problem bydepicting it as regrettably frequent. In-formation campaigns stress that alco-hol and drug use is intolerably high,that adolescent suicide rates are alarm-ing and that polluters are spoiling theenvironment. Although the claims areboth true and well intentioned, the cre-ators of these campaigns have missedsomething basic about the complianceprocess. Within the statement “Look atall the people who are doing this

unde-sirable

thing” lurks the powerful andundercutting message “Look at all thepeople who

are

doing this undesirablething.” Research shows that, as a con-sequence, many such programs boom-erang, generating even more of the un-desirable behavior.For instance, a suicide interventionprogram administered to New Jerseyteenagers informed them of the highnumber of teenage suicides. Health re-searcher David Shaffer and his col-leagues at Columbia University foundthat participants became signiﬁcantlymore likely to see suicide as a potentialsolution to their problems. Of greatereffectiveness are campaigns that hon-estly depict the unwanted activity asdamaging despite the fact that relativelyfew individuals engage in it.

Liking

“

fﬁnity,” “rapport” and “affection”all describe a feeling of connectionbetween people. But the simple word“liking” most faithfully captures theconcept and has become the standarddesignation in the social science litera-ture. People prefer to say yes to those

L U I S M . A L V A R E Z

A P P h o t o

PUBLIC COMMITMENT of signing apetition inﬂuences the signer to behave con-sistently with that position in the future.SOCIAL VALIDATIONtakes advantage of peerpressure to drive human behavior. Poorly applied,however, it can also under-mine attempts to curtaildeleterious activities, bypointing out their ubiq-uity: If everyone’s doingit, why shouldn’t I?